“Yes,” Giles repeated. He was amazed yet not overwhelmed by her direct approach. He kept his eyes upon her. “Unfaithful.”
There was a weight in the word that madame Vervier would not feel, for André was now entangled with his thought of Owen. It was hardly eighteen months ago; and André had succeeded Owen. But all unaware, as she might well be, of his further knowledge, her next words answered, by implication, the charge. If she admitted contemporaneity in love, why not succession? “There,” she said, “you were mistaken. We were lovers, it is true; but he knew that it was not to last. He knew that if not death, then life must part us. In his heart he was not unfaithful. He would have gone back to her.”
“Do you mean with a lie?” asked Giles.
“With a lie? Yes; I imagine it would have been with a lie,” madame Vervier did not hesitate. “But the essential would be there. He had not ceased to love her.—It was not his fault. He was swept away,” she said.
Had she looked like that when she had swept Owen away? Was it an easy, an everyday thing to her, to see men swept away? He tried to beat down the visions that assailed him, but again and again, on the rising surge of the “Sapphische Ode,” they returned. Owen sitting before her, as he now sat, in the pale, fresh, shaded room; Owen rising suddenly to take her in his arms.—There would be no surprise to her in that.—She would have seen it coming. “You mean that it was your fault, then?” Giles muttered.
“No. I do not mean that,” madame Vervier answered, and as, in speaking, she weighed her stone lightly up and down, her eyes on his, he felt that it was his heart rather than her own guilt she weighed so in her hand.—How often she had weighed men’s hearts! How conversant with their trembling must she be! “No; that is not what I meant.—He moored his boat at the edge of a torrent. That was all. He was swept away,” madame Vervier repeated.
“That was what Alix said of you,” Giles muttered again. He felt as if madame Vervier must see the throbbing of his heart.
“What Alix said of me?”
“That you were like a mountain-torrent. She wanted me to understand you. She thought I might be of help to you some day. She thought of you, poor child, as in some kind of danger; beautiful and in danger.—How can you say it wasn’t your fault?” Giles demanded, and, with the thought of Alix and what she hoped from him, he felt that he struggled to keep his footing. “If you carried him away, it was your fault.—I believe that’s what you live for; to carry men away,” he heard himself unbelievably uttering, and it seemed to him, as the sombre magic of her eyes dwelt on him that it was for Owen he was speaking, and for all the others; since now he understood them all.
Madame Vervier, after he had said these last words, contemplated him in silence. For a long time she said nothing, and Giles, in the silence, felt that their confrontation was altered in its quality. When she spoke at last, it was not in anger. It was, rather, with a strange mildness. “I do not overflow my banks, ever,” she said. “You must not launch your boat upon me; that is all.”